A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

The new Nvidia Fermi-based GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 GPUs were officially announced a few days ago, but we still don’t have them on the market. Currently one a selected group of reviewers are being able to play with video cards based on the new GPUs, run benchmarks and even try them with 3D Vision, something that I sure most of you are quite interested in. Unfortunately I still haven’t had the chance to personally try a GeForce GTX 470 or GTX 480 video card with 3D Vision, so I can’t tell you much either and this leaves us with only the official results coming from Nvidia. The chart above shows a comparison between a GTX 285 (the former top model) and the GTX 480 (the new top model) running at 1920×1080 resolution with High Detail levels and even with some AA. The results coming from Nvidia are measured in frames per second (the scale on the left) across multiple new and popular game titles like Resident Evil 5, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Left4Dead 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum. And based on these results (and some more perhaps) Nvidia is claiming that the new GTX 480 is up to 2x faster than the GTX 285, and that on Full HD resolution, with maximum detail levels and even with some Anti-Aliasing active. So if we trust these results you can say that the new Fermi-based video cards (the GTX 470 should be a good choice too, especially if you are on tighter budget) are the perfect choice for gaming in stereoscopic 3D mode with 3D Vision, so now we just have to wait a bit more for them to be available on the market…

With the introduction of the Fermi GPU architecture comes another interesting new feature that will interest some of the 3D Vision owners. Of course I’m talking about the 3D Vision Surround technology that adds support for stereoscopic 3D gaming on triple monitor setups. That however requires you to have two GeForce GTX 470/480 GPUs in SLI configuration for optimum performance, but it should also work with two GeForce GTX 200-series video cards again in SLI configuration. The reason for needing more GPUs is because 3D Vision Surround requires up to 746 million pixels per second of rendering horsepower and that is one hell of a burden for a single GPU to cope up with and still provide good enough framerate for comfortable playback. You should have in mind that in the currently available release 197 of the video drivers there is not yet support for 3D Vision Surround and you’ll be able to play in stereo 3D only on a single monitor. 3D Vision Surround will be enabled in the next release 256 of the drivers, that is due for release in April 2010, so a few more days of wait… but with no cards on the market yet that should not be an issue, right? And it seems that with the next official driver for the Fermi-based cards we are also going to have support for games using DirectX 11, so we’ll be able to play those in stereo 3D mode without having to revert to DX10 or DX9 anymore… ;)